The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I took the liberty of pointing out how I had set forth in my *Philosophy of Freedom* (1893), drawing on the sources of the anthroposophical worldview, what I had attempted to articulate in the 1880s and 1890s of the previous century in opposition to the agnostic mindset. This *Philosophy of Freedom* bears the motto on its title page: “Results of psychological observation using the scientific method.” Initially, this motto was directed against a school of thought that I, to a certain extent, held in the highest regard: the school of thought of Eduard von Hartmann, whose *Philosophy of the Unconscious* bore the motto: “Speculative results based on the inductive-scientific method.”

[ 2 ] “Speculative results”—that was something that, at its core, seemed to me to run counter to the very essence of genuine intellectual and human understanding; for by “speculative results” or “speculative thought content” one can only mean what arises when, through abstract logic, one proceeds from what one perceives to something that cannot be perceived—that is, when, through inference, one recurs, as it were, toward an unknown that is said to be accessible only through the chain of thought, not through perception.

[ 3 ] In response to this entire way of thinking, I had to argue that whatever is to be knowledge and the meaning of life for human beings in every respect must, in some way, enter directly into observation and perception. Just as external scientific facts present themselves to consciousness and can be observed, so too must psychological and spiritual contents present themselves to consciousness and thereby be accessible to observation. For if one could not bring into consciousness everything that, in any respect, concerns human beings precisely in relation to their deepest inner being, then one would have to assume that human beings are guided and directed by strings from unknown worlds—worlds that can be accessed at most through abstract thought, but which can never be experienced. But whoever carries the phenomenon of freedom—the experience of freedom in the full sense of the word—directly within their consciousness cannot help but reject metaphysical conclusions in the sense I have indicated; they must strive to regard as the results of observation, as possible present contents of the soul, precisely that which can influence them in relation to their most intimate being. The philosophy of freedom seemed to me inseparable from what can be expressed in the phrase: “Results of psychological observation according to the scientific method”—that is, the method of observation that the natural sciences had learned to rely on would also have to be extended to what is to become the content of human spiritual life.

[ 4 ] Based on these foundations, the question of a philosophy of freedom became a burning issue, for what the concept of freedom encompasses is an immediate human experience, and all one really needs is enough open-mindedness to say to oneself: Human freedom is experienced. — There is, in consciousness, the experience of the free human being. The view of nature arising from agnosticism cannot, in this case—because it essentially rejects everything that points toward the spiritual—form an unbiased judgment about this direct experience of freedom; for it sees its ideal in explaining everything according to the so-called causal method, that is, in such a way that every event is conditioned by a cause and proves to be an effect. And this agnostic-scientific mindset believes it is violating the laws of a genuine explanation of the world if it accepts, anywhere, something that cannot be explained according to the principle of causal necessity. But no matter how hard one tries to explain the world in terms of causal necessity, the very act of consistently developing this causal explanation prevents one from approaching the experience of human freedom. This immediate experience simply falls outside the scope of the causal explanation.

[ 5 ] How, then, has the agnostic-scientific mindset coped with this? It has simply—I would say—allowed the immediate experience of human freedom to be obscured by causal explanation. People say: Causal explanation does not allow for human freedom; therefore, it does not exist. — And so, if on the one hand one cannot help but look impartially at the experience of freedom, and on the other hand is sincere about modern science, one is confronted with a dilemma: either to abolish freedom—which is possible only by obscuring that very impartiality— or to devise all manner of explanatory devices so that, at least in appearance, this freedom might be brought into some conceptual connection with the causal explanation of modern science.

[ 6 ] These paths could not be taken by anthroposophical thinking. Precisely if it were sincere in its commitment to scientific causal explanations and to the principle of “impartiality of observation,” it would also have to observe the phenomenon of freedom impartially. And so the necessity arose to apply the spirit of the scientific worldview—that spirit trained in observing the physical, biological, and other phenomena of external nature—to the phenomenon and revelation of human freedom as well. But this could only happen if the entire cognitive disposition of the soul toward this problem of freedom became different from what it is in the scientific approach. On the one hand, one had to hold fast to the latter; but, in order to move toward the problem of freedom in its spirit, one had to further develop it on the other hand. One had to, so to speak, elevate into free human experience itself that which is achieved in the natural sciences through a mode of thinking that synthesizes and illuminates natural phenomena.

[ 7 ] In observing nature, one relies on external sensory experience. One develops the human world of thought—the content of thinking—in contrast to sensory experience, and what emerges as true reality is that which is formed from the one-sided content of experience from the external world and the one-sided content of thought. One supplements that which, as I said yesterday, confronts the human being as a half-reality through his or her constitution. If one wishes to grasp this freedom—which is, after all, an experience immediately identical with the human being—one cannot rely on external phenomena. One must connect thinking itself with that which is, I would say, in the process of one’s “I.” One must observe what stands before one in freedom, but while observing, one must at the same time develop thinking, just as one otherwise develops it through the phenomena of external nature.

[ 8 ] What Goethe found so appealing when Heinroth called his thinking “concrete” must become apparent on an even higher level if one is to grasp the revelation of freedom, for Goethe linked his thinking to the external, sensory aspects of the plant world. There he succeeded in immersing his thinking in the object, in living with active thinking within the object itself; but the object remained passive. If one wishes to apply this—if I may still call it that—concrete thinking to freedom, then one must permeate the supersensible-spiritual realm, which is in constant activity within the fabric of the human soul, with the activity of thinking in an even more intimate way. One must not penetrate something external; one must penetrate that which develops within oneself with the activity of thought. Through this, however, that which now becomes the content of thought breaks free from any attachment to an object in the ordinary sense.

[ 9 ] What thought accomplishes here becomes an act of liberation in itself. Thought rises—not by becoming devoid of content, but precisely by being filled with the most intimate flow of human existence itself—to a free flow that allows one thing to well up from another. The soul’s content is filled with something that it itself produces and that, in its very production, is at the same time objective. The spirit of the scientific way of thinking is elevated to the exploration of the soul’s most important achievements for human beings.

[ 10 ] Thus, however, the spiritual-scientific method was applied to the realm that underlies human beings as ethical, moral beings, and this method consists of nothing other than the experience of a content that is present when human soul life breaks free from its attachment to external objects. And if the soul is then able to experience something further, that experience is a supersensible one. Qualitatively, what has been sought here as results of soul observation is nothing other than what I later asserted with regard to the exploration of the various realms of the supersensible worlds. What was later asserted does indeed lead one into realms other than those immediately accessible to human beings in ordinary life; but with regard to the innermost nature of the soul’s constitution, one proceeds in these supersensible realms no differently than one must proceed when investigating the essence of human freedom, so that one gains a true understanding of this essence. One initially limits the subject of investigation to the human being as a free being within the physical world, but this free being is rooted in the supersensible. In the investigation of freedom, one moves within a current of supersensible research. For anyone who takes fully seriously what he is actually doing—what is actually happening within him as he moves within this current of supersensible research—the path gradually opens up of applying what he has now employed for the investigation of human freedom to other realms as well. And one thing emerges for them from such investigations with a clearly evident necessity: that if a person does not obscure the path to freedom through scientific prejudices, if they impartially investigate that aspect of the nature of freedom which is present in their most everyday life, then that person will come to at least initially, in this realm, to recognize that he is capable of detaching himself, in his inner spiritual life, from the physicality that is otherwise the instrument of thought—because this physicality must precisely provide what external observation offers, to which thought then adds its complement. And one knows what supersensible research is when one has properly investigated the problem of freedom. One is already immersed in the spirit of this research, which then leads one upward into the heights of the supersensible world. But precisely because the spirit of agnosticism has led people to prefer denying an unbiased observational result—such as that which arises from the investigation of freedom—rather than modifying the meaning of causal explanation, it was indeed necessary to oppose what the scientific worldview had made of the problem of freedom by the end of the 19th century.

[ 11 ] What a person experiences in their innermost being—what they experience in relation to the world—requires that they come to terms with themselves regarding what is in the world and in their own nature from which the impulse of freedom springs. If a person cannot come to terms with this within themselves, the consequences will manifest in their immediate life. These consequences manifest in such a way that he becomes an incomprehensible being to himself—one that is not transparent to his own understanding and, consequently, to his life as well. He then feels in the world as if his understanding were not grounded on solid ground. He looks, as it were, into himself, and where he would like to see his own being shining and glowing, he sees a kind of hollowness. One can speak of this void—one can discuss and philosophize about it—but one cannot live with this void. It hollows out life itself, renders it barren, kills its most important, its most intense drives, and erases that inner substance of life which human beings need in order to find a connection with the outer substance of life in the activity necessary for themselves and the world. If one wishes to understand human beings in their relationship to action, then one needs a philosophy of freedom. But then one also needs—at least initially, for the problem of freedom—a transcendental inquiry.

[ 12 ] This problem of freedom reveals with the utmost clarity how human beings themselves must oppose the agnostic worldview. If one were to move toward anthroposophy, this could weigh heavily on one’s soul, especially if one were at the same time entirely sincere about the magnificent achievements of scientific research in recent times. For whoever regards knowledge as I described it yesterday—as a life process, not merely as something formal—must, in striving for knowledge, connect his life with this real process of knowledge³ itself. And as they become a person of action, what they are to the world becomes united with what is revealed to them through their knowledge as their innermost being.

[ 13 ] Now, in this era of agnosticism, one might also encounter a human figure who presents himself as the living embodiment of the question: How can one live with that which the agnostic mindset regards as an absolute, irrefutable truth? —For anyone in the last third of the 19th century who sought to grapple with this profound existential enigma, this human figure must itself have appeared, in some way, as an enigma of the times. By this human figure, I mean Friedrich Nietzsche. For everyone in the last third of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche was indeed a human figure who seemed to embody, as if alive, that which pressed itself upon one’s soul when seeking the sources of knowledge of an anthroposophical life. This is what makes Friedrich Nietzsche’s personality so unique: that, in a sense, everything one could experience in the last third of the 19th century—specifically the most outstanding worlds of thought and feeling that were pushing toward agnosticism—found its outlet in his soul.

[ 14 ] Friedrich Nietzsche had started out with a sound intellectual foundation, and although he was in fact an outstanding philologist—so outstanding, in fact, that he had secured a university professorship even before earning his doctorate—his soul was deeply imbued with the scientific spirit of his time. He could not help but relate to the world in such a way that this world became perception for him in the sense of the scientific mindset of his time. Since he had to experience the whole—from the perspective of full humanity—he needed, for this world of perception—which is, after all, only half the world—that which, from within the soul, must first unite with this world of perception to form a full reality. Nietzsche saw the external world of perception, and he viewed it as one simply had to view it in the spirit of his era. And the impression of this world of perception pained Nietzsche. One need only bring the entire psychology of Nietzsche’s soul before one’s own soul to understand the statement: External observation, tinged with a scientific mindset, became an inner pain for Nietzsche. — What is at stake here is nothing less than the fact that, gradually, the scientific way of thinking has transformed the external world of perception into one that causes inner pain when one allows it to take effect upon oneself. For everything that causes pain is that which a person would like to view in such a way that it fills him, that it gives his soul substance, and of which he then realizes that it does not provide his soul with full substance, that it leaves him empty. Then the terrible realization arises in his soul that he hungers for what the world ought to give him, and that he cannot satisfy this hunger because the world cannot provide him with full satisfaction.

[ 15 ] This is what Nietzsche first felt as he came of age in the 1860s. At that time, he turned to whatever could, in a sense, lead him beyond this pain—experienced in the innermost depths of his soul through his perception of the external world—and beyond this suffering of the world. He searched everywhere for elements within what he encountered in world culture and in the development of humanity that could help him rise above the great inner pain he experienced in his interaction with the world. And there, two things presented themselves to him at first: First, he immersed himself in Richard Wagner’s wondrous musical world and artistic worldview. He sought with his whole soul to lose himself in the way Richard Wagner, leaving the external world behind, rose to a world to be created by human beings—a world that draws upon everything humanity has ever created in its myths and so on—in order to transcend immediate external existence. And for Friedrich Nietzsche, this was linked to the second element: Schopenhauer’s philosophy, to which Richard Wagner himself had become a follower after his Feuerbach period. In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Nietzsche found the full confirmation that the perception of the external world can truly inspire only pessimism. For him, it confirmed that what the soul must experience cannot be found in the external world, nor in the world of blind will; that human beings must therefore rise above what external observation can provide through something they have created themselves. For Friedrich Nietzsche, it was a relief to hear from Schopenhauer, on the one hand, that the human world of ideas—which, in keeping with its era, could offer only an imperfect, painful image of the world—was in fact merely an illusion, and that what is not an illusion—the will—is, in essence, not binding upon human beings, so that humans have a right, as it were, to rise above the blindness and folly of the will in the world through this illusion.

[ 16 ] For Nietzsche, this second element was connected to something else. It was connected to what emerged for him from his philological studies: an immersion into the nature of the Greek soul, into the way in which the Greeks, in their own way, coped with what Nietzsche regarded as an unsatisfying existence. He delved into the true meaning of Greek art, and this meaning struck him as though the Greeks had fully experienced the entire tragedy and all the pain of an unsatisfying sensory existence. He believed that the Greeks had turned to art in order to rise above the otherwise inevitable pessimism of existence. Greek art—whose revival Nietzsche also desired for modern man—was, for him, a consolation that humanity sought in the face of an external world of perception that could be experienced only in a pessimistic sense.

[ 17 ] According to Nietzsche, human beings needed to escape into a world that would carry them beyond the pain of existence. And it was out of this mindset, out of this tragedy, out of this anguish of the soul, that Nietzsche wrote his first book, *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*. The spirit from which he wrote it was the belief that the Greeks felt the tragedy of perceptible existence so deeply that they could only overcome this tragedy by creating, in their minds, a tragedy that transcended all reality, in order to find solace in it for the tragedy of external perceptual reality. Nietzsche was then imbued with this sense of being in the world, as he understood it, when he wrote his “Untimely Meditations,” when he dismissed David Friedrich Strauss, when he sought to describe the unsatisfactory nature of a merely historical mode of representation that merely records, when he sought to articulate the true spirit of Wagner’s music, and when he sought to speak about Schopenhauer himself. All of this took place in the first half of the 1870s.

[ 18 ] In these “ “Untimely Meditations,” Nietzsche held up a mirror to his era—which was mired in a perception he found unsatisfying and painful—in such a way that he countered everything his contemporaries said with what the “full human” must find and invent within himself in order to endure at all that which, in Nietzsche’s opinion, his contemporaries could delude themselves into believing made them philistinely happy. He portrayed David Friedrich Strauss as the very archetype of the philistine, one who points to the satisfactions of the external world of perception and who, in a homespun manner, refuses to rise to a spirit that transcends this world of perception.

[ 19 ] But then, around 1876, Nietzsche came to realize the pressure that this modern scientific mindset—which, in essence, permeates everything that confronts the mind—can exert on the human soul. Ultimately, the strength with which Nietzsche had sought to take refuge in a world of consolation—as a counterbalance to the unsatisfactory nature of the external world of perception—was sapped. He could no longer indulge in the belief that one could somehow find, from within humanity itself, a way out into a comforting, self-created world, for he gradually came to perceive that which seeks to rise above the reality of external perception as a lie, as a deceitful illusion. And the years 1875 and 1876 became, for him, years in which, as he himself put it, he cast one such “life lie” after another onto the ice, so that they might freeze to death.

[ 20 ] This was, in essence, an even more tragic state of mind than the previous one, for in the earlier state he believed he could find solace in the illusions of life regarding the perceptual world, which imposed itself as reality despite its one-sidedness. Now, however, he could no longer even cling to these illusions as a source of comfort, and in a certain sense he became a fanatic of truth, so that he said to himself: No matter how deeply this reality, as presented by the external senses, may tear the soul apart with inner pain, it is the reality that lies before us for the time being. — This immense burden was imposed on Friedrich Nietzsche by his agnostic disposition. From then on, he could no longer bear this burden, and so he sighed forth what he expressed in his book of aphorisms, *Human, All Too Human*: “O you poor human being”—this is roughly how Nietzsche felt—“O you poor human being, you conjure up ideals, illusions, into which you flee from the sensory realm into a supersensory one; you want to rise from the human to the divine; by developing forces that seduce you into such illusions, you only fall deeper into the human depths, and what you initially developed in a naïve way as your humanity becomes something subhuman, something all-too-human. Examine your instincts, examine your selfishness, and you will see how you conjure up selflessness as an illusion, as a moral ideal! The truth is that you speak of selfless ideals, but fundamentally you are merely worshiping a more refined, an all-too-human selfishness; in your subconscious there lives an element that lies far beneath your humanity—not merely beneath what you strive to ascend to, namely the divine. — It was from this state of mind that the writings “Human, All-Too-Human” emerged for a true seeker of truth.

[ 21 ] But Nietzsche was not merely a theoretical thinker; Nietzsche was a soul within whom everything that could be experienced in the development of worldviews during the last third of the 19th century found expression. Nietzsche could not pour this fanaticism for truth into his writings and his thoughts, into his words, in the same way that theorists do. Nietzsche could not speak in the self-sufficient manner of, say, an Emil Du Bois-Reymond in his “Ignorabimus” or “The Riddle of the World” speech. Speaking in such a manner was, for Nietzsche, unspeakably alien to the world, for to him, closeness to the world was that which lives directly within the innermost recesses of the human soul—that which can be experienced when one descends into one’s deepest inner self. That is why Nietzsche could not share the mood that glides smoothly and elegantly from concept to concept in “Ignorabimus” speeches. One need only observe, from a purely human yet fully human standpoint, the style and attitude of such an “Ignorabimus” discourse. It is as if the person were speaking in such a way that his heart—that his fully human self—were not present at all while he speaks, as if the thoughts of the mind were running their course automatically. Something quite insubstantial and diffuse winds its way, as smooth as an eel, through all the sentence structures that speak of Laplace’s conception of the world and the like, and then of the fact that where the scientifically comprehensible world ends, supernaturalism must begin—but that where supernaturalism begins, science must end.

[ 22 ] For Nietzsche, what he was able to experience there became the very meaning of his life and the tragedy of his existence. Scientific development itself in the last third of the 19th century became the innermost tragedy of life for Friedrich Nietzsche, for now—having become a fanatic of truth, a positivist, a Voltairean—he had to let what was unfolding in his mind permeate his entire being; he had to feel the fullness of humanity in the process. What he had previously dreamed up from the spirit of the human mind—from intellectual knowledge—in his *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music* and in his *Untimely Meditations* as a consolation for the scientific tragedy of life, he could no longer derive from his system of thought; for him, that system no longer yielded thought. In the first phase of his life—the “dark” one, as I characterized it yesterday—he sought to penetrate and illuminate perception—which seemed to arise as if from sleep—with the content of the human soul. But this human spiritual content became for him only that which subsequently turned out to be an illusion. And so, during his positivist period, he felt confined to the one-sided world of perception, which is only a part of reality, but not the whole of reality.

[ 23 ] Thus Nietzsche had to turn to other sources to find a way to fill his soul with a content that would at least allow him to go on living. What thought could no longer illuminate for him had to be developed—as in an inner spiritual fire that proved fateful for him—through feeling and emotion, and we see this feeling and this emotion acting as if to burn away thought in his writings from the 1870s, *Dawn* and *The Gay Science*, which sprang from his soul as if through an inner spiritual inflammation. As beautiful as these works may be—what had accumulated within him through pathological psychological experiences discharged itself into inflammations that poured fiery life through his soul, and this fiery life was now able, for a short time, to lift him above the unsatisfactory, above that which had previously been meant to lift him through the comfort of which I have spoken to you.

[ 24 ] But Nietzsche was still so firmly rooted within himself that he sensed this fiery quality of his soul; he was still so firmly rooted within himself that he felt the urge to find his inner experience alongside his external perception. And as he, so to speak, mustered his last reserves of strength to transcend the one-sided world of perception, to reach that experience which, together with this external perception, alone constitutes full reality—it is in this striving that lies what came to full expression within him during his third epoch, when he wrote his *Zarathustra*, that *Zarathustra* which can be characterized by Nietzsche’s own words: Now one has become human, but as a human being one is condemned to suffer from the world, for the world imposes a one-sidedness upon one; the world does not fulfill one. One has become human and stands in the world. But what does it mean to be human if the world does not trigger within the human being that which makes him a being toward which his deeper powers themselves must strive? — And so the thought forced its way out of Nietzsche’s soul: Therefore, man must not remain a man, for if he remains a man, he hollows himself out; he must drown in pain. Man must become the Übermensch. Man, who cannot come to terms with his nature in the world, must overcome himself. There must be a bridge, just as there is one from the worm to man, so too from man to the Übermensch. Nietzsche wanted to shatter this human shell so that from this shattering might emerge that which could now live in harmony with the world, springing from the deepest driving forces of humanity. And Zarathustra was to be the teacher and bearer of this idea of the Übermensch.

[ 25 ] But Nietzsche could not speak in the forms that the modern scientific spirit—the spirit of agnosticism—had brought about. He had to find another language—one that surged toward the lyrical, epic, and dramatic; he had to find a language that would even lead one out of the state of consciousness in which this modern, agnostic scientific spirit is conceived. It is as if Nietzsche, everywhere—especially in the most significant passages of his *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*—were pushing his way out of ordinary consciousness toward a kind of super-consciousness, as if he were seeking a transformation, a metamorphosis of consciousness, in order to be able to live in a world that cannot be reached by ordinary everyday consciousness. It was as if Nietzsche felt he had to transcend the way humans relate to the world. Zarathustra is not meant to be a person who follows the pedantic pace that modern humanity has grown accustomed to, moving at the tempo dictated by the external, one-sided world of perception. Zarathustra was to become a light-footed spirit who dances right past whatever else weighs people down and holds them back in this one-sided world of perception.

[ 26 ] Everywhere one sees a lyrical and impassioned striving of Nietzsche’s consciousness toward a higher, supernatural world—a world in which the Übermensch could be found, a world that cannot be found within ordinary consciousness. And in other writings from this final period of Nietzsche’s work, one sees the emergence of an idea that pushes in the same direction: that enigmatic, mysterious idea of the eternal recurrence of the same.

[ 27 ] As Nietzsche contemplated this life, as it is lived between birth and death, it seemed to him—based on all that I have now described as having accumulated in his soul—as if it could never be exhausted in itself, as if it would be nonsense for it to unfold exactly as it appeared between birth and death. Then, from deep within him, the idea of the return of the same surged forth—the idea that the life I am now living between birth and death is not the only one, but rather returns again and again and must return. And now, I would say, the most tragic aspect of Nietzsche emerges: the dissatisfaction with this one earthly life, but also the inability to rise to a truly world- and spirit-appropriate idea of development, one that sees in repeated earthly lives a progress, an ascent of humanity. Nietzsche was unable to give the repeated earthly lives, which he accepted, a meaning derived from a spiritually conceived idea of development. Thus, he clung desperately to the repeated earthly lives; thus, he was unable to transcend such a repetition, which always allows only the same to unfold, no matter how often this earthly life may repeat itself. This earthly life carries within it the demand not to remain merely as it is. But it proves incapable, even in eternal repetitions, of ever producing anything other than that which is, in the deepest sense, unsatisfying and tragic.

[ 28 ] If one considers what I describe here as the content of Nietzsche’s soul—not as a system of abstract thoughts, but as something that wells up from the fullness of human nature, wells up from the human being in such a way that it encompasses everything that this person is in terms of mind, soul, and body, then one can indeed view this personality in such a way that one understands his collapse at the end of the 1880s. And it can indeed draw our attention to the special nature of the sources of knowledge we need, when we see how such a life collapsed on the very sources of knowledge that agnosticism regards as the sole ones, as the absolutely correct ones.

[ 29 ] Friedrich Nietzsche strove, in the most sincere sense, to live with his full, whole human being in accordance with what the insights of the last third of the 19th century could offer humanity for its life. In his experience, Nietzsche became a fighter against his time. That is why I titled the book I wrote about Nietzsche: “Nietzsche, a Fighter Against His Time.” Nietzsche developed within himself a mindset that was bound to emerge in a deeply sensitive individual during the last third of the 19th century as a result of scientific developments. He experienced these developments as such a personality could, and he experienced what was bound to turn such a personality into a fighter against his time—this age of agnosticism. Nietzsche was indeed predisposed to be a fighter against his time; but he broke down, and before he broke down, he felt most at ease with his inner fighting spirit when he could live as a hermit many meters above sea level, above all that people of our age experience in their lives as they have come to be. It was this engagement with the sources of knowledge of the 19th century—and indeed of our time in general—that made Nietzsche both a fighter against his time and a hermit.

[ 30 ] That is why Nietzsche could not fulfill the demand that presents itself to those who seek knowledge as such a formidable one in our age. Does this age demand of us that we retreat to Sils-Maria as hermits, just so we can at least keep up with our times? No, this age—precisely because it makes us fighters against the epoch—demands that we place ourselves right in the midst of social human life, right there where the great problems must be led toward a solution in a vital, lived way, rather than in isolated theories. Nietzsche shows us what a discerning nature that genuinely experiences the times must go through; he shows us the tragedy of the life of such a discerning, combative spirit. But at the same time he shows us—as true as it is that he was, from the depths of his innermost being, shaped into a fighter of his time, and as true as it is that this struggle against agnosticism is necessary in our time—that he, Friedrich Nietzsche, the tragic fighter against this agnostic era, lacked the right weapons for this necessary struggle. We must look for these proper weapons; and it is my sincere conviction that, for our time, these proper weapons—these spiritual weapons—can be provided solely by the methods, the approach to research, and the life-impulses of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.